Crunch time

As an engineer, you must have been tempted to shout at the TV whenever a pundit appeared to explain that shuffling vast amounts of cash around was a flimsy foundation for national prosperity.

Come on, admit it. As a member of the UK’s productive economy – someone in the designing and making things business – you must have at least once been tempted to shout at the TV screen whenever a pundit appeared to explain for the umpteenth time that shuffling vast amounts of cash around the place was, in retrospect, a pretty flimsy foundation for national prosperity.

Something along the lines of ‘we told you so, you idiots’ perhaps, or maybe something less suitable for a family newsletter.

It could be worse. We could be Iceland, where even now a whole generation of newly-redundant financial whizz-kids is hauling granddad’s fishing net out of the loft and brushing up on the difference between a plaice and a turbot.

In the UK we still have a world-class aerospace and defence sector, a skilled oil and gas workforce that is in international demand and a manufacturing base that has quietly got on with surviving its own version of the credit crunch for the last decade with little or no support or thanks from anyone else.

We produce cars of every shape and size and have some of the world’s most renowned technology-focused university departments.

Some of this is because of the policies of successive governments, some of it is despite those policies. What needs to change now, in the new post-credit bubble world, is any notion that the UK’s engineering, technology and manufacturing base is somehow a poor relation or an afterthought – because that is often how it seemed.

Even when they were saying and doing the right things, there was a sense that the powers-that-be saw the productive sector as something of an economic sideshow, important certainly but not at the top table where billions could be conjured from nowhere by a few thousand suits in the Square Mile of the City.

The emergency measures of the last week will hopefully allow the financial industry to get back to what should be its core purpose of funding the growth of companies in the productive sectors of the economy.

What it won’t do is allow financial services to be the economic engine of growth it has been for the last decade and more. That growth will have to come from somewhere else – which is where you come in.

So let’s be clear that engineering matters, technology matters and manufacturing matters, and the opinions of those who work in them count. In that spirit we urge you to look at the results of the first Engineer/YouGov quarterly survey, which gives a valuable insight into the opinions of more than 1,300 engineers on issues including graduate skills, government support and the esteem in which the profession is held.

Those opinions matter, and so do yours. Click here to see the headline findings of the survey.

Andrew Lee, editor

Visit the UK’s dedicated jobsite for engineering professionals. Each month, we’ll bring you hundreds of the latest roles from across the industry.

There’s no harm in providing a useful banking and broking service to help put people who have money to invest in touch with people who need investment, but when the nation, or its newspapers, start asking questions about the electricity supply or the environment, the answer is simply “You can ask the engineers, but you should have done it 15 years ago.”

As engineers, we harness the complexities of a wide range of materials and combine them with the laws of physics and sophisticated mathematics to make something simple enough for humans to interact with and gain value from.
Conversely, financiers take the simplest mathematical operators (addition & subtraction – that’s all you can do with money!) and with them weave webs of opaque complexity such that even they do not understand what they have constructed. Unfortunately, when their structures collapse they take everyone’s wealth with them. There’s a lesson for the future here.

This article really should be forwarded to all of the lawyers and economists in the House of Commons, with reading it made compulsory. Others that should read it include the vast majority of bank managers who don’t seem to have the slightest grip on reality and unable to understand their part in this sad episode.

Damn right…..the idea of a fiscal financial hub being our main source of generated wealth was always bogus, AND I SHOUTED IT FOR YEARS, much to the amusement of the non-productive paper-shuffling accountants and asset strippers.

Resting on Great Britain’s superb engineering laurels must now cease…..
Let our nation get back to doing REAL work ,making quality products the real World needs.

The purpose of the financial restructuring is to fund the growth of the whole economy; with manufacturing being a part. Actually, engineering may not do so badly out of the turmoil. Public financing will remain, as will industries with captive markets. Industries for food, health, vital institutions etc will remain vibrant as will transport infrastructure,research such as NASA, CERN, ITER etc. There is enormous scope. Fewer holidays, luxuries, widget manufacture and silly banks will not affect the strength and prestige of engineering; and engineering careers seem a lot more promising than financial ones.

Somehow we need to get this message to the mass media that seem to be totally preoccupied with doom and gloom. Unfortunately, by our very nature we Engineers are not good at pushing ourselves forward. Hopefully though there is a wave of change on the horizon in view of recent events. My worry is that we may, as a nation, become totally dependent on technology: imagine the situation when something breaks down and there are no Engineers left to fix it.

This article reflects something I have said for years, we need to protect those core manufacturing industries and the research and development that go with them. Financial sectors have dominated the economy for far too long, and the money has not been wisely invested in technology to progress the manufacturing technologies.
Formula 1 and American NASCAR are two prime examples. Where are nearly all the championship winning cars developed and made? Yes, the UK. This is reflected in many other industries, but too many people look to short-term financial gains by moving production to other countries such as those in Asia. What they fail to see are the implications to the UK economy in the long term, continued development of products and technology, and the cost burden of reinvestment in equipment and machinery to move manufacturing back to the UK.
Economics are simple: if you spend more money then you make you have a deficit, if you spend less than you make you have a profit. Its a simple ethos.
Problems with a country are that a deficit leaves many people unemployed, industry in turmoil, and a knock on effect which takes years to recover from.

Right then; I can hear them right now in the back of pubs, saying “It’s those damn Yanks with those Shim-Sham lower class mortgages, dumping on the poor old unsuspecting Brit economy.”

Right? Well yes in part, I am a well trained aerospace graduate and have served along side the Royal Air Force overseas, and let me tell you, if I had my way it would be different. Too much risk and no policing of the financials on both sides of the pretty little pond. Since this is now a Global economy I guess we should all learn something from all of this mess. Our best investments are our respective people and their ideas and not always the paper notes that sometimes pass for security.

It is nice to read a positive view for a change. I was in Ireland recently where things are not exactly rosy but noticed that the radio and TV press seem to generate a positive outlook and produce a mix of pundits so a balanced view is given, even to the extent that they talk about preparing for the recovery. In the UK we seem to drag up every doom merchant we can find and give a totally imbalanced view centred purely on the financial sector. Did I read recently that city bonuses paid last year totalled over £16bn?

Shouting at the TV screen indeed. I’ve been doing it for months, if not years, whilst the financial world carries on believing that betting on share movements or commodity prices is a solid basis for business whilst forcing the government to bin tax free bonus schemes with their greed (my bonus might have amounted to 10% gross salary max), completely trashing endowment returns AND my initial pension provisions.

Meanwhile the 30-strong niche engineering company with whom I work continue to integrate high-tech equipment, add intellectual value and export 95% of production. But what future will the global crisis in ‘confidence’ bring?